BtZ: Pirate//Brown on Fantasy

[Smoke Teff]

Noting some things in *Life Against Death *and *GR* that seem related (at
least, they made me think of one another in rereading)., especially as we
start looking at Pirate and his gift more.

Brown (I mean you could pull ten relevant sentences out of any page in this
book, so this is sort of arbitrary) says, pp 162-3 of my paperback of *Life
Against Death:*

"The regressive orientation keeps not only our moral personality
(character, conscience) in bondage to the past, but also our cognitive
faculty--in Freudian terminology, the ego's function of testing reality.
The human ego, in its cognitive function, is no transparent mirror
transmitting the reality-principle to the id; it has a more active, and
distorting, role consequent to upon its incapacity to bear the reality of
life in the present. *The starting point for the human form of cognitive
activity is loss of a loved reality.*"

163: "the ego does not abolish the pleasure-principle, but derives from it
the energy sustaining its exploration of reality."

"Hence also human consciousness is inseparable from an active attempt to
alter reality, so as to 'regain the lost objects.'"

"*The more specific and concrete mechanism whereby the body-ego becomes a
soul is fantasy.* Fantasy may be defined as a hallucination which cathects
the memory of gratification.; it is of the same structure as the dream, and
has the same relation to the id and to instinctual reality as the dream."

164 "Identifications as modes of installing the Other inside the Self are
fantasies."

"Fantasy, according to *The Interpretation of Dreams, *is the product of
the primary process, the human organism's first solution to the problem of
frustration."

Quoting Isaacs: "reality-thinking cannot operate without concurrent and
supporting unconscious phantasies."

171: "Projections, with their fetishistic displacement of inner fantasies,
must distort the external world."


GR p. 12: "You can't run a war on gusts of emotion."

GR p. 31: "All these things arise from one difficulty: control[...] The
control is put inside. No more need to suffer passively under 'outside
forces'--to veer into any wind."

p. 36: "Incredible black-and-white Scorpia confirmed not a few Piratical
fantasies about the glamorous silken-calved English realworld he'd felt so
shut away from."

p. 36 "[...]Scorpia figured as his Last Fling--though herself too young to
know *that*, to know, like Pirate, what the lyrics to "Dancing in the Dark"
are *really *about...

"He will be scrupulous about never telling her. But there are times when
it's agony not to go to her feet, knowing she won't leave Clive, crying *you're
my last chance...if it can't be you then there's no more time....*Doesn't
he wish, against all hope, that he *could *let the poor, Western-man's
timetable go...but how does a man...where does he even begin, at age 33...."

p. 37 "Yes he is waiting, to see if it will end for Roger the same way,
part of him, never so cheery as at the spectacle of another's misfortune,
rooting for Beaver and all that he, like Clive, stands for, to win out. But
another part--an alternate self?--one that he mustn't be quick to call
'decent'--does *seem *to want for Roger what Pirate himself lost...."

p. 37 "'You *are *a pirate,' she'd whispered the last day--neither of them
knew it was the last day--'you've come and taken me off on your pirate
ship. A girl of good family and the usual repressions. You've raped me. And
I'm the Red Bitch of the High Seas....' A lovely game. Pirate wished she'd
thought it up sooner. Fucking the last (already the last) day's light away
down afternoon to dusk, hours of fucking, too in love with it to uncouple,
they noticed how the borrowed room rocked gently, the ceiling obligingly
came down a foot, lamps swayed from their fittings, some fraction of the
Thameside traffic provided salty cries over the water, and nautical
bells....

"But back over their lowering sky-sea behind, Government hounds were on the
track--drawing closer, the cutters are coming, the cutters and the sleek
hermaphrodites of the law, agents who, being old hands, will settle for her
safe return, won't insist on his execution or capture. Their logic is
sound: give him a bad enough wound and he'll come round, round to the ways
of this hard-boiled old egg of world and timetables, cycling night to
compromising night...."

"Scorpia's talc-white face, through the last window, across the last gate,
was a blow to his heart. A flurry of giggles and best wishes arose from the
Wonder Midgets and their admirers. Well, though Pirate, guess I'll go back
in the Army...."

It sounds like an apocalyptic death-sex fantasy.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20160325/70652053/attachment.html>